“Imagine National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation with a Gremlins undertone!”

Co-written by Todd Casey and Michael Dougherty, with the latter also in the director’s seat, comes a nice little holiday horror comedy flick, Krampus. Straying from traditional holiday movie elements, the film is reminiscent of Kate’s story of why she hates Christmas in Gremlins. Not so much the events that happened to her, but the dark feelings that surround her during the holiday.

THE PLOT

The movie begins with a hilarious montage of what most of us would see during “Black Friday” and frantic, last minute Christmas shopping. The classic Christmas song “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” is playing during this scene, and anyone who has been “Black Friday” shopping can see the irony in that song choice! The film centers around Tom (Adam Scott) and Sarah (Toni Collette) Engel and their family as they prepare for the arrival of Sarah’s sister and her family, along with the detestable Aunt Dorothy (Conchata Ferrell), whose condescending and unappreciative character is probably the funniest and most relatable member of this clearly dysfunctional family. EVERYONE has someone like this in their family!

One of the central characters is the young son, Max (Emjay Anthony), an innocent boy clinging to the hope that the true spirit of Christmas still exists. But that hope quickly disappears amongst all of the family’s bickering and his cousins constantly teasing him. The final straw is the when his cousins mockingly read his letter to Santa out loud at the dinner table, leading him to tear up his Santa letter and throw it out the window. This is where the chaos begins, with what seems like a target being placed on the family for the arrival of Krampus, the dark side of Santa and the seemingly punisher of the non-believers. As the family struggles with a power outage and their own personal issues, they begin to look deeper into themselves and realize that they must band together in order to survive!

SHOULD YOU SEE IT?

I would say that I enjoyed this film for what it was. Not necessarily a “scary” movie, it does have its share of creepy scenes and a few well timed jump scares. I found the humor to be the driving force behind the film, which in this case worked really well. My only complaint is that I wish that Krampus’ image would have been left more up to the imagination. To sum it up, Krampus is the perfect Christmas holiday flick for horror fans that don’t really like Christmas and/or holiday flicks!